BlogBloghttp://www.conceptsguy.com/blog/2012-01-02T23:13:44ZSquarespaceCremaLab New Years!http://www.conceptsguy.com/blog/2012/1/2/cremalab-new-years.htmlConceptsguy2012-01-02T21:53:34Z2012-01-02T21:53:34Z2012 is bringing some exciting updates at CremaLab. We wrapped up a very successful 2011 and said goodbye to a great friend as Steven Chau Magic transitioned out to Seattle, WA to join the Startup Weekend team! We are so excited for Steven and are excited about continuing to work with him as CremaLab continues to grow our relationship with the awesome Startup Weekend team! 

We also said hello to some great new rockstars!

Dustin Hayes joined CremaLab coming to Kansas City from Joplin, MO. Shortly after joining the team, Joplin was devastated by a horrific tornado. We were thankful to hear that all of his family and friends were safe, though the disaster touched us all. Dustin is helping to shape our CMS driven web experiences!

Also joining the team was Ross Brown. Ross has been working with CremaLab for years, but the timing was right for him to come on board as an official member of the CremaLab team. His expertise is putting CremaLab on the map in our front-end experiences! And we are always excited to see him growing his music label, Golden Sound Records.

Our newest member starts TODAY! Joe Longstreet is an exciting addition to the leadership team at CremaLab. He'll be helping CremaLab to shape facebook, web, and mobile apps that we develop for our clients and for ourselves. Joe comes to us from one of the big players in town so we are excited to see his interest in helping us grow! With Joe joining, CremaLab is also excited to help out more with the local UpFront developer's Meetup.

CremaLab is all about working with the best people!

Startup Weekend experienced some awesome growth this year as well, and we were blessed to be a part of it. We helped them shape their sites and created some great web application tools for their team management! Our team is passionate about working with these innovators in the entrepreneurial space.

We explored challenging puzzles and attempted to be funny with Slugworth Inc. Motostew launched with a brand new interface and new custom e-commerce solution. We have had a great time partnering with Curious Pixel to work on cross-browser implementations. We loved working with the amazing team at Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation helping design products for Kaufman Labs and iStart. University of Kansas Memorial Union gave us great insight in to the rich history of KU. And we've met with countless entrepreneurs to get creative with their ideas!

As 2012 begins, CremaLab is ready to smash it in the product strategy, UX, design, usability testing, development and promotion of cutting edge digital products! Can't wait to get started! Happy New Year!

]]>Living the dreamhttp://www.conceptsguy.com/blog/2011/11/17/living-the-dream.htmlConceptsguy2011-11-17T22:07:50Z2011-11-17T22:07:50ZSeason of Growth

In the last year, my company, CremaLab has gone  through an amazing season of growth. We've gone from being a small UX/UI focussed design crew to a full service digital product development company.  This has offered great rewards and great challenges.  A recent Smashing Magazine artle talked about going from a designer to a creative director.  The article could not have pinned me any more accuratlely.  In the nexte few weeks, I'm hoping to share a bit of my experiences through our beginings, our growth, some challenges, and a few goals/ dreams for the future. 

Some ground rules.  

Ignore my horrible grammer and most likely my horrible spelling. As I've mentioned before, I'm a creative, not a copywriter.  I'll do my best to use spell check, but if these posts are actually going to happen, they have to come from the hip, and we all know that firing from the hip produces some interesting results. 

Living the dream

This is what living the dream looks like.

So I just got off of an interview with a new applicant for a position at our company.  Often times, we open up the question of "Now do you have any questions?"  to which there's usually the akward.............  "No, I don't think so..."  But this person asked a question that I probably haven't asked myself in a long time.  "What do you like about working at your company? "  As the founder and owner, most often I'm focussed so much on selling our overall culture, services, and general "So what DO you DO?" answer, that I don't think about directly why I, George Brooks, like working at my own company.  So lets make a simple list, shall we?

Reason's I like working at CremaLab 

  1. This is my dream job.  I've wanted to work in a creative enviroment, with creative people, creating creative things, since I can remember.  Several attempts to make this happen in different shapes and forms has landed to me working with some of the greatest young vibrant minds on the planet. 
  2. Which leads me to my second item.  Our crew.  Off the top, my long time best friend Daniel Linhart is my business partner.  

    I know I know.  Dangerous!!!  But it's been amazing.  Two totally opposite sides of the brain that when communicating well, really creating something amazing.  Not to mention a crew that is truely a mix of old and new friends, who are wildly talented guys. Of whom I trust each of them to do great work and represent CremaLab in an amazing way!
  3. We are creating something amazing! Not only the products that we are working on, but the time spent on how we build those products. Our processes, or focus, our strengths, our goals, our differentiators, etc. 
  4. Culture.  This is somethign that we talk a lot about.  Something that we glean from places like Zappos, google, and many others. We are all about creating a place with our crew can flourish, creative through is encouraged, and everyone really has a say.  This doesn't always happen every day, but its something we are always thinking about.  The video above shows just a piece of this in action.  But there's also the Xbox in the office, the creative office itself,  the beer in the fridge, the art on the walls, the collaberation or random dancing in the office.  All of this creates an amazing place to work.  



More to come...

I'm excited about sharing more of the full story.  But you can tell that a lot has happened in the last year.  

Please share your story as well.  Have you been through a change from freelancer to company owner, or creative to creative director?  Let me know what you think. 

]]>Spam out of controlhttp://www.conceptsguy.com/blog/2011/11/16/spam-out-of-control.htmlConceptsguy2011-11-16T22:35:40Z2011-11-16T22:35:40ZI am so sorry about the spam. Working on cleaning it up and updating my blog soon!!

]]>So it's official!http://www.conceptsguy.com/blog/2010/7/15/so-its-official.htmlConceptsguy2010-07-15T12:58:23Z2010-07-15T12:58:23ZActually, it was official about 7 months ago, but I'm depressingly bad about updating the blog, as most people are with their blogs.  I'll keep it short.  Check out my companies most recent work at

]]>More on Hosted CMS for Designershttp://www.conceptsguy.com/blog/2010/3/5/more-on-hosted-cms-for-designers.htmlConceptsguy2010-03-06T04:05:05Z2010-03-06T04:05:05ZiPhone blogginghttp://www.conceptsguy.com/blog/2009/11/25/iphone-blogging.htmlConceptsguy2009-11-25T16:25:45Z2009-11-25T16:25:45Z

Can I run an entire blog from my iPhone? We shall see. The new release if th SqaureSpace app has started me thinking about my blog again. I've noticed that sitting in front of the computer puts my mind emmediately in to work mode. And I can never seem to find time to finish thinking through what I have to say.

Alright, let's think this through.

Squarespace iPhone app
1. Create and edit posts. Good
2. Take photos or add from photo library. Eh... this will do. If I use one of my new favorite apps, Pastebot, I can grab images from other web sites. I mean I review web stuff. This is important!
3. Video. Hmm. I only have a iPhone 3g. No video built in. Ustream to the rescue. Record local share to YouTube. Embed with Pastbot.
4. Embeded links. So far, haven't round a turn key way to do this in the Squarespace app, but again Pastebot Mateo the job here.

I'm excited to get started. and I think I finally found a use for Pastebot.

]]>A HUGE Catchhttp://www.conceptsguy.com/blog/2009/8/27/a-huge-catch.htmlConceptsguy2009-08-27T13:52:39Z2009-08-27T13:52:39ZI've had my blog up for a few months now, and though contact forms often don't capture of a lot of attention. I hoped to receive at least one friendly message, but no luck! My new friend, @Gabriol took the time to shoot me a tweet!  "@conceptsguy tried to contact you via your blog but there is no submit button to send you an email."

WHAT!?! No Submit!? Square space to the rescue! 

 

A Huge Catch, and quick fix! from conceptsguy on Vimeo.

 

The joys of trying to use a CMS based content management system based on a template design structure, you have to kinda hack your way in to getting what you need.  Don't take that as a bad thing. Building off the SquareSpace interface is a dream, and just down right fun! But as it goes, it comes with some quarks. As the video shows, it was quick check to see that I needed to increase the padding a bit on the main container, and the button was in plain view!  A simple solution for a pretty huge problem!

]]>A Little Inspirationhttp://www.conceptsguy.com/blog/2009/8/25/a-little-inspiration.htmlConceptsguy2009-08-25T16:39:57Z2009-08-25T16:39:57ZWhile recently I've spent most of my time doing proposals, site testing, and project management, I'm constantly viewing all my work through the lens of design and usability.

I've taken a few minutes to capture just a few ways that I keep an eye of design, and where I find a little inspiration every day.

Twitter.com (more specifically Tweetdeck)

I've been using twitter for some time now, and while there is a ridiculous amount of confusion about what to do with twitter, I find that its a fantastic monitoring tool to stay up on design trends.

I absolutely love tweet deck for their column few of search results. My two favorite search terms, "User Interface Design" and "Web Design Inspiration" provide me with a regular feed of more amazing links to resources and inspiration than I could possibly ever consume.

Smashing Magazine

Smashingmagazine.com is will probably not be a surprise to anyone reading this list. They've been around for several years now, but I will say that they are consistently providing top notch material for designers, freelancers, developers, and creatives in general. I'm not sure how they manage to scrape the internets to find such great resources over and over, exposing new and fantastic content authors, but they they continuing to find resources for individuals that  push the envelope in design and more importantly taken a clear stance on usability.

Envato

I wouldn't say that I'm obsessed, but boy am I impressed with the Envato community. I'll admit, I commonly rest in that space of the 95% of online users that consume content, but rarely contribute.  And I feel like I'm just steeling in some horrible way when I spend time on any of the Envato sites.   Tuts+Hub, Marketplaces, FreelanceSwitch, AppStorm, Creattica, and TheNetsetter.  I could spend most of my day just enjoying the smooth styling of their pages let alone the resources I gather while I'm there.  

These sites were created for me. I'm sorry guys! If you go there, have fun! But just remember that when Envato was starting I'm sure they were thinking, "What style, feel, content, and resources would George Brook in Kansas City want to enjoy?" They weren't thinking of you, and its not your fault!  Maybe one day, but for now, I've fallen in love with the Envato sites.

The Rabbit Hole

As you all know, as you dig in to the web, it can easily become a glorious and almost overwhelming rabbit hole of information, but when it comes to design I love it.  I love finding one page that links to another and then another and another analyzing how we can make code usable. How do we take data that once was impossibly in-consumable (double negative?) And put that top love of Creme (more to come on that theme soon), that golden Crema that rises to the top of the perfectly made espresso shot. All at the same time invoking emotion, simplicity, intrigue, and making information accessible to all.  

 

]]>Social Analytics at its best!http://www.conceptsguy.com/blog/2009/7/28/social-analytics-at-its-best.htmlConceptsguy2009-07-29T02:32:27Z2009-07-29T02:32:27ZGone are the days of surveys and focus groups.  Paying call centers to come in and call so many thousands of people and waiting for some small town person that could care less about your product review probably planning to hang up on poor guy sitting behind the phone.  Gone are the stuffy focus groups waiting awkwardly for you to try a product and fill out a survey to get a free t-shirt.  Companies no longer have to seek out looking for if their customers like their products or not. Instead, their customers blast it all over twitter, facebook, and youtube.  They blog about their experiences and comment on threads of online news publishers. Advertising and marketing agency are flooded with desperate calls from their companies asking them to sift through the sentiments online There have only been a few tools that would step up to the task to really show what the online ecosystem has to say. But now their is one company that has finally taken the lead in this race.  

Infegy  "Understand Millions Instantly"  And that's the dead truth.  Infegy just launched their new website today! It truly reflects the quality of their product(Social Radar). and as I sat in their offices talking through their goals for the site, it took very little time after they showed me their tools for me to realize that this is going to change the way that brands view their customers.  No longer do the companies control their brand through conventional media.  People are the new media.  Every business will tell you that word of mouth is the best sales person.  But what if word of mouth could spread between single individuals at literally the speed of light.  Wouldn't you want to know what those people are saying?  I did.  Its just incredible.  I could see sentiment analysis showing me the positives and negatives of conversations. I could see trends. TRENDS!!  They were archive over a billion feeds just so that you can look in to the past to see what changed from now until today.  For the better, or in todays economy, for the worse.  

How could I as a company begin to address the real media that matters? My customers. Not only can you see the global vision of what's being said by everyone instantly, but you can drill down to the top feeds, and even all the way down to the very individuals that made the comments. What an opportunity.  No longer are customers 100 stories down, below the streets, in amongst my competition.  They are right in front of me telling me exactly what they think of my product.  Mind blowing!

Needless to say. I had a great time working with the crew over at Infegy helping them pull together a design that really spoke to that level of a product. 

Don't wait to give them a call to start looking at Social Radar!

]]>Status Updatehttp://www.conceptsguy.com/blog/2009/7/24/status-update.htmlConceptsguy2009-07-24T15:34:18Z2009-07-24T15:34:18Z

Untitled from conceptsguy on Vimeo.

Referenced: 
http://www.sketchengine.com (coming soon!)
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